Software’ and ‘Creative Commons’ movements (Lessig, 2004; Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006; Elliott and Scacchi, 2008). Web 2.0 is widely seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications and bring about a ‘re-evolution’ of science (Waldrop, 2008).
Web 2.0 brings the promise of enabling researchers to create, annotate, review, reuse and represent information in new ways, promoting innovations in scholarly communication practices – e.g. publishing ‘work in progress’ and openly sharing research resources – that will help realize the e-Research vision of improved productivity and reduced ‘time to discovery’ (Arms and Larsen 2007; Hey et al., 2009; Hannay, 2009; De Roure et al., 2010). However, despite this increasing interest in Web 2.0 as a platform and enabler for e-Research, understanding of the factors influencing adoption, how it is being used, and its implications for research practices and policy remains limited. Recent studies suggest that there is considerable reluctance – even suspicion – to adopt new forms of scholarly communications among many academics, who fear that this will mean the end of the ‘gold standard’ of peer-review and the undermining public trust in science (Procter et al., 2010a; Procter et al., 2010b). Equally, it would be a mistake to ignore the capacity of established academic publishers to shape the emerging scholarly communications landscape so as to preserve their role as gatekeepers (Stewart et al., 2012). The future of scholarly communications may, after all, not be so radically different from its recent past.
1.4.5 The Future
The vision that motivated the e-Science programme in the UK and analogous programmes elsewhere was that grid computing-based infrastructure comprising computer power, big data and collaborative teams would transform science. Over the past decade this has morphed into a much more complex e-Infrastructure made up of a plethora of only loosely related tools and services taken up to different degrees and in different combinations and with different levels of enthusiasm even within the same field, allied with rapidly accreting digital data of new types and old. The e-Research facilitated by this maelstrom is transforming social science research, but in unpredictable ways, with many socio-technical barriers to be overcome before its full potential is realized. The aim of this book is to whet the appetite of social researchers to encourage them to explore how innovations in digital research methods might enable their research to advance in ways not possible otherwise.
1.5 Online Resources
Many of the examples of e-Research methods presented in this book already have online resources associated with them. To make these more accessible to readers, we have created a companion website.12 This provides easy access to this content, including in-depth case studies, datasets, research workflows, tools and services, publications and links to the authors’ own websites.
1.6 Bibliography
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Ananiadou, S., Okazaki, N., Procter, R., Rea, B. and Thomas, J. (2009b) ‘Supporting systematic reviews using text mining’, in P. Halfpenny and R. Procter (eds) Special Issue on e-Social Science, Social Science Computing Review Journal, 27(4): 509–23.
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Fraser, M., Hindmarsh, J., Best, K., Heath, C., Biegel, G., Greenhalgh, C. and Reeves, S. (2006) ‘Remote collaboration over video data: towards real-time e-social science’, Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 15(4): 257–79.
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